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Damien Echols & Lorri Davis - Yours for Eternity

Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - 6:00pm

Yours for Eternity ($27.95) is an intimate look at the extraordinary love story between Damien Echols and Lorri Davis, who met and married while Echols—author of the New York Times bestseller Life After Death—served nearly eighteen years on death row.

From one of the greatest legal injustices of our time sprang one of the most unlikely—and unforgettable—love stories. For anyone who followed the case of the “West Memphis Three,” or read Damien Echols’s memoir, Life After Death, there is one lingering question: Who was the woman—courageous, affected, or just plain crazy enough—to fall in love and marry him while he was on death row? Lorri Davis was a landscape architect living in New York City when she saw Paradise Lost, a documentary about the three young men imprisoned in Arkansas for an unspeakable crime they didn’t commit. When her first letter arrived in Echols’s cell in 1996, hers were some of the first kind words of support he had heard.

Over the course of a remarkable sixteen-year correspondence, Echols and Davis grew to know each other, fall in love, and marry—all without ever being able to touch each other freely or be alone together. In Yours for Eternity, they describe also how they overcame the enormous challenges and heartbreaks throughout the years—personal setbacks, legal complications, and much more. Astoundingly, thousands of their personal letters have survived, to create a singular portrait of their marriage told in alternating voices by Echols and Davis both. Yours for Eternity reveals a relationship unfolding in the most exceptional of circumstances. Powerful, unique, and incredibly intimate, it is a modern-day love story for the ages.

Damien Echols and Lorri Davis met in 1996, and were married in a Buddhist ceremony at Tucker Maximum Security Unit in Tucker, Arkansas, in 1999. Echols spent nearly eighteen years on death row until his release in 2011. He is the author of the New York Times–bestselling memoir Life After Death (2012). For more than a decade, Lorri Davis spearheaded a full-time effort toward her husband’s release from prison, which encompassed all aspects of the legal case and forensic investigation and, with Echols, served as producer of the documentary West of Memphis. Echols and Davis live in Massachusetts.

From one of the greatest legal injustices of our time sprang one of the most unlikely--and unforgettable--love stories. Damien Echols was just eighteen years old when he was condemned to death for a crime he didn't commit.